Dedicated Media Server - How strong should the CPU be?

[Grey Fox]

I want to decouple my media server from my gaming rig.

Any idea how powerful should the CPU for this be?

[Darth Wagtaros]

If you are going to be using it purely as a player you shouldn't need a top of the line eight core processor.  More RAM and a decent video card would be nice.  Maybe a good audio setup to plug the computer into.  Along with a high end sound card. Like a Sound Blaster.

[Grey Fox]

It won't be use to playback the files, streaming thru serviio to different devices, including a xbox360 (so lots of transcoding).

[DontSayBanana]

It won't be use to playback the files, streaming thru serviio to different devices, including a xbox360 (so lots of transcoding).

There's no such thing as too much RAM in a server; the more you've got, the more simultaneous connections you can keep alive and healthy.  I'm not sure the transcoding usage ups the CPU requirement so much as the motherboard requirement, since a good motherboard is going to have a better discrete math coprocessor- transcoding is going to involve a lot of FLOPs, so you're going to want to stave off floating point precision errors as long as possible.

[Grey Fox]

So, i5!

[DontSayBanana]

So, i5!

An i5 on a decent motherboard should be more than enough for a local server, yeah.

[Arvoreen]

Honestly, I run my media server in a VMWare virtual machine, running on ESXi on my single server in the basement.  Which also has VMs that run Windows 2008 as an active directory controller, a dedicated mail server, a development version control box, a 'work' development box (for dedicated VPNing to work) and another VM that acts as a TimeMachine backup node for my wife's iMac.

Now granted, I don't serve more than 1 stream usually, but I've only had problems with it transcoding 1 movie -- and that was a 3D full HD Hansel & Gretel movie

[Grey Fox]

I have an MSDN account. Windows versions, license & price are not an issue.

[Arvoreen]

So install Server 2012 and set it up as a virtual machine host.  You can make it do more than just sit and wait for media streaming